The place was chilly. The thermometer read sixty degrees, though he had set the thermostat to seventy. The old furnace always struggled to keep up with the weather.
The answering machine had no messages, which meant his aunts hadn’t heard about an Empire reporter turning up dead in a canal. Eddie wouldn’t be the one to tell them, he decided. Let them have one more good night of sleep before they started worrying.
He tossed the day’s Empire, still unread, onto the arm of a black leather recliner. A chessboard on his coffee table needed a minute of attention. The pieces were deep into battle; the vanquished soldiers were on the sidelines. Ah-ha! He captured a white bishop with a black knight, and then spun the board around for tomorrow’s move.
A skinny shorthaired cat trotted out from the bedroom. Its charcoal coat was shiny at certain angles, like the ocean in moonlight. Its eyes, the color of lily pads, were half shut; Eddie had disturbed a nap.
“Hello, General VonKatz,” Eddie said. “Sorry I’m late. Bad day. I suppose you wanna eat?”
Eddie scooped up his cat, stepped over a pizza box on the floor and collapsed on the recliner, the one soft item in a room furnished with a maple coffee table, a straight-back pine chair, and the mysterious upright piano that had come with the rental house. A forgotten tenant had long ago abandoned the piano. Eddie had tried to sell it, or to give it away. It played just fine, and there were takers. But nobody could move the thing. No amount of human muscle power could lift that goddam piano. Either it was cast from lead, or fixed somehow to the floor. Eddie once tried to lighten it for a trip to the landfill by ripping out wires and washers and whatever else he could detach from the belly of the thing. Made no difference. So Eddie made peace with the piano; it was a fine TV stand.
The General squirted out of Eddie’s arms and headed for his food dish. “All right, I’ll open a can of something,” Eddie said.
As he stood, a headline in the paper, low on page one, caught his eye:
“Shots Fired No Threat to Downtown Lowell.”
Eddie’s byline was beneath the head, but he didn’t recognize the story.
LOWELL—Two small-caliber gunshots fired during a neighborhood disturbance in the Acre early this morning posed no danger to revitalized downtown Lowell, nearly one mile away.
An argument, most likely between people who live in that neighborhood, escalated when one participant fired shots into the air. A teenager was grazed.
What the hell’s with this? Fired shots into the air? A bullet grazed a teenager? His work on the shooting had been rewritten. The information about the cocaine—the heart of the dispute—was gone from the first paragraph. He read on. More of the same—twisted facts and half-truths, arranged to minimize the incident. Nothing was an outright lie, and the information about the cocaine was still there, but buried at the bottom where nobody would ever see it because the piece was now so goddam boring. His one exclusive fact that police had found the gun had been lost in rewrite.
He read it again, seething and scalding red with embarrassment. This is under my name, as if I had wanted it this way. As if Edward Bourque did not give a damn about his readers, or about the truth.
He jumped up and paced the room. I’m being edited like an intern. He wanted to break something. Smash it to atoms. He settled for kicking the pizza box. It skipped across the room and dumped a leftover slice of extra cheese, greasy-side down, on the carpet.
Eddie twisted the newspaper into rope.
Chapter 3
Eddie woke in the recliner, slouched and sore. The morning had dawned filthy gray, like Eddie’s mood. Wind rattled the storm windows. General VonKatz dozed on Eddie, bent around his neck like a fur collar. As his human stirred, the cat hopped up, stretched out thoroughly and ambled to a window to curse at the chickadees mooching from the birdfeeder.
Coffee. Eddie needed his strongest blend.
He found a bag of Sumatra beans in the freezer. He ground them fine, let the brew drip chocolate brown and gulped it black. It was bitter and nourishing. He pictured a tiny Indonesian boy on a decrepit family farm, his little back bending beneath the sack of raw coffee beans he would lug a mile to market to make a dime. With his mug raised in salute, Eddie spoke aloud, “Keep it coming, kid.”
Yeah, he was going to be a bastard today.
Eddie moved mechanically through the morning, barely paying attention to the road along the eight-minute drive to the office. He had to find out what had happened to his shooting story, what the police had learned about Danny’s death, and he had to steel himself for a difficult interview. Today he would call Nowlin’s widow, Jesse, for a follow-up story.
The elevator doors opened as the morning news meeting was breaking up. The meeting was a ritual at just about every daily newspaper. At The Empire, the city and suburban desk editors, and representatives from the sports, business and lifestyle pages, met in Keyes’ office early each morning to hash out the story budget for the afternoon’s edition. The editors pitched their favorite stories for page one. Keyes had the final say.
Gordon Phife was last out of the meeting, his face buried in his notes. Phife wore a monochromatic gray outfit, a shiny gray tie and white high-top sneakers. Eddie stopped him. “We have to talk, Gordon. That story—”
“Not here,” Phife said in a low voice. “Later.”
“We should run a correction in today’s paper—”
“Just calm down, Ed.”
“—Saying that I had nothing to do with that piece of shit.”
Phife glanced around. “We’ll talk tonight. On the driving range.” He started to walk away.
“Gordon!”
“I’m dealing with a dead reporter and a bunch of live ones trying to put out a newspaper,” Phife said. “And you want answers now? Tonight, Ed. You know what I drink.”
Eddie sighed, exasperated. “Call me,” he said, “when you’re ready.”
Keyes was alone in his office. Eddie knocked. The editor waved him in.
Franklin Keyes was half the reason his reporters liked to say that The Empire was two funerals from being a great newspaper. He was stumpy and pot-bellied, with thick wavy hair, dyed an impossibly perfect black. His hands were plump and soft, like pudding in rubber gloves, his tongue often stained a color of the artificial rainbow from the lollipops he ate throughout the day. Keyes had never done a hard day’s work in his life. He had married well, latching onto the daughter of The Empire’s venerable publisher, Alfred Templeton. Keyes had become the editor without ever having been a reporter, which was like teaching flight school without having piloted an airplane.
His office was as insubstantial as the man. The bookshelves held none of the great books on the craft of journalism. Instead, Keyes had cluttered the place with photographs of himself with the famous people his position had enabled him to meet, many of them on the golf course. His gold letter opener was shaped like a putter. The ball from his alleged hole-in-one, ten years ago, was mounted on a plaque.
Eddie sat down and waited. Keyes flipped through a book of wallpaper samples. He held a maroon paisley print to the wall and said, “I think you’ll do fine.”
“Are you talking to me?” Eddie asked.
“I’m a little occupied right now, Bourque,” he said. “What do you want?” His tongue was green.
“What’s the plan for the Nowlin follow-up stories?” Eddie asked. “I figured I’d interview Jesse today. Maybe Spaulding can work up a sidebar on the investigation?”
Keyes dismissed Eddie’s ideas with a sour face. “I want you concentrating on the political beat. We have an election in a couple weeks, and I don’t think we’re ready for it.”
I’m off the story? Disappointment pooled in Eddie’s gut. He couldn’t imagine whom Keyes would assign to write the follow-up. He probed for the answer. “I suppose Melissa will do better with Jesse, anyway.”
“Melissa’s too busy to talk to Jesse Nowlin.”
Not Melissa
, either? “Don’t you think a straight police follow-up is a little weak to lead second-day coverage?”
Keyes sighed, annoyed. “Did Alfred make you editor while I was in the can? You cover politics. Go get me some, and leave the Nowlin matter alone. We’re all sad about Danny, but this institution is going to move on.”
“But the story—”
“The matter is being handled, Bourque,” Keyes said, cutting Eddie off. He pointed a chubby finger toward his office door. Eddie threw up his hands, and followed the finger out of there.
The story’s being handled? Who’s handling it?
In the newsroom, Eddie found a heavy-set woman with thick wrists sitting at his desk. She looked around forty, very muscular in the shoulders—maybe too muscular. Her hair was pulled back in a bun so tight it stretched her skin like a bargain face-lift. Another woman, thin, late fifties and graying gracefully, was at Nowlin’s desk. Eddie didn’t know either of them.
“Who are you two?” he demanded.
They paid his rudeness no attention. The one at Eddie’s desk answered. “Mr. Bourque? I’m Detective Orr from Lowell Police. This is Dr. Mary Chi, a computer science professor at the university whom the department consults from time to time. I’m investigating Daniel Nowlin’s death. Your editor, Mr. Phife, says you might know Daniel’s computer password?”
“Sorry,” Eddie mumbled. “I don’t recognize you from when I covered the cops.”
“I just made detective,” Orr said. She looked Eddie up and down, and then stared at his face, like she was memorizing every ridge, mole and crease.
Eddie leaned over Dr. Chi and tapped in rottenbastards. Nowlin had meant his password to refer to the politicians he covered.
Chi’s slim fingers rapped on the keyboard. She culled through directory trees, isolating text files. She said, “Mr. Nowlin kept copious notes. He left an electronic address book.” She smiled. “And he liked to play Doom.”
“Copy the notes on one disk, the address book on another,” Detective Orr ordered.
Chi popped a floppy into the drive, and then played the keyboard like Rachmaninov.
“What’s this all for?” Eddie asked.
Detective Orr responded with a non-answer. “This is an investigation into an unexplained death. I’m looking for an explanation everywhere I can.”
“Do you know how he died?”
“That’s being determined.”
“You think it’s related to a story?”
“I did not say that,” Orr answered, sharply. She smiled. “And as I’m sure you realize, I can’t talk about the details of an ongoing investigation.”
She was professional, polite, and infuriating. And obviously hiding something. Eddie opened his mouth to argue, when Dr. Chi spoke out, her thin voice at a high pitch.
“What’s happening here?” she said, fingers clicking still faster over the keys.
The screen went blue. Strings of error messages appeared. A page of text opened on the screen, flashed into garble and then vanished. Another one appeared, and then also changed to garble. The computer’s hard disk spun and crackled.
“This is an error. A big one,” Chi said. She held down the reboot keys: Ctrl, Alt and Delete. No effect. More text flashed into view, and then flashed out as garble. Chi reached below the desk and pressed the computer’s power button. The machine ignored her. The hard disk continued to spin and whir. Text files flashed on and off the screen too fast for Eddie to recognize the words.
“It’s destroying the files,” Chi shrieked. “Cut the power! Get the plug!”
The three of them dove beneath the desk, knocking skulls. Eddie muscled past Chi and reached behind the computer. He felt wires and yanked at them. Wrong ones. The disk kept spinning.
“The fat black wire,” Chi shouted in his ear.
The machine suddenly throttled down and stopped. Eddie got up. Detective Orr held the plug in her hand. “Can’t tell a power cord from speaker wire, Mr. Bourque?” she said.
“I grabbed whatever I could,” he said, embarrassed.
“Uh-huh.” To Dr. Chi, Orr said, “Take this machine to your office and see what you can salvage from it.” And then to Eddie, “Let’s hope this Keystone Kops episode didn’t ruin anything that could be evidence.”
Chapter 4
The telephone woke Eddie at three-fifteen in the morning. He didn’t bother to answer. Still dressed in work clothes, he got up, creaky, and stepped into his shoes. He pulled on a sweatshirt, popped a Red Sox cap on his head, and wrestled into a wool overcoat. He shuffled to the refrigerator for the beer he had bought on his way home.
General VonKatz was up. He whined around Eddie’s feet. Eddie bent over—cartilage cracking in his back—and showed the General what was in the bag. The six bottles inspected and sniffed for his records, the cat trotted off in search of new adventure. He spied a moth on the ceiling. Not much meat on it, but the General settled for whatever prey wandered in. He coiled, tail flicking, on the mysteriously heavy piano, ready to strike should the moth come a little lower.
“Don’t eat him,” Eddie advised as he went out the door. “He’ll give you moth breath.”
Eight minutes later, Eddie was downtown. He left the Chevette around the corner from the Empire Building and walked to the office. The elevator took him to the tenth floor. He passed a glass door stenciled with “Alfred T. Templeton, publisher,” and let himself into a closet where the cleaning crew kept the mops. There was a ladder there.
Eddie shoved open the trap door at the top of the ladder. Red light poured in. The Empire’s giant neon E hummed overhead. It crackled and popped as it flickered. The roof was as big as a baseball diamond, and ringed by a knee-high safety wall. A roofing of tar and loose pebbles crunched under his Doc Martens. The air was thirty degrees but completely still; it felt much warmer.
Phife was behind the E, reclining in the giant white satellite dish that captured the Associated Press news feeds from around the world. Gordon Phife was forty, a bachelor and a lifelong newsman, who had bounced around the Atlantic seaboard his whole career, slowly climbing the ranks of news editors. His skinny face, narrow shoulders and slight beer belly gave him the look of a former fat man nearing the end of a long diet.
Phife always had a sly, sleepy-eyed look. The red neon tinted his freckled face and close-cropped blond hair. He looked drawn; the dark spots beneath his eyes stood out like purple thumbprints. He wore jeans, a puffy ski jacket and the leather driving gloves Eddie had given him last Christmas. There was a golf club leaning against the dish.
“I figured we’d practice a fairway iron tonight,” Phife said. “Once I fix your slice, I’ll let you swing the driver again.”
Eddie handed him a lager from the bag, and then took one for himself. “I knocked over a TV antenna last time with the driver,” he said.
Phife answered as Yoda, from Star Wars. The impression was dead-on. “You hit ball a long way, do you now Eddie? But you must learn to use your power for good, not for evil.” He smiled.
They clinked bottles. “To Danny,” Phife said. He drank, and then asked, “Did you see Boden at the press conference?”
“He let me have it for coming back to where my career started.”
“Aw, fuck that guy,” Phife said. “You’ve been eating his lunch since you got here.”
“You and I know that,” Eddie said. “But I can’t get noticed in Boston. Coming back to The Empire was a tactical move, to get back in the market every day, and to build the resumé for the big metro dailies.”
“Give it time. You’re only starting your second year.”
“There wasn’t supposed to be a second year,” Eddie said. “I gotta move up. Since the mills died off this town has been Second Bananaville.”
“You’re dissing the birthplace of Jack Kerouac and Bette Davis?”
“Yeah, I’ve read the tourist brochures. Ed McMahon from the old Tonight Show grew up here, too. For Christ’s
sake, he’s the biggest second banana in television history. And Charles Sweeney was born here.”
“Who?”
“Bomber pilot. Dropped the second most famous bomb in history, on Nagasaki.”
Phife sighed and shook his head. From his jacket he produced a cloth sack and dumped twenty golf balls onto the roof. “People will do all kinds of insane things for what they love,” he said. “You’re doing what you love. That sucks if it doesn’t make you happy.”
Eddie shot back, “And you’re satisfied here? Working your seventy hours a week? When was the last time you went out of your house, except to come to The Empire?”
Phife let out a long, exaggerated sigh. He said, “I’ve been staying at home a lot. It’s a great thing to have a lady aboard with clean habits.”
That had to be a movie quote. Phife was a former movie reviewer. He lost the job because he never hated a picture; he saw hidden brilliance in Howard the Duck. Eddie had no idea from which film Phife had lifted the line. Gordon wouldn’t tell him unless he guessed, at least once.
“Kramer vs. Kramer?” Eddie said.
“Nope. The African Queen.” Phife stumped Eddie most of the time, and Eddie had never snuck a movie quote past Gordon.
Eddie saw Phife’s satisfied grin, and then shouted, “You son-of-a-bitch, you got a new woman!”
The grin got bigger.
“Docked the Titanic yet?” Eddie asked.
“A gentleman doesn’t tell.”
“That means no.”
Phife beamed. “But I ordered an armoire. Solid maple.”
“For what? For your rathole pad?”
“For her stuff,” Phife said, a little defensive. “A girl’s gotta know that her guy cares. And a little style never hurt.” He stretched on the satellite dish like a cat in the sun, a dreamy little smile on his lips. “I haven’t closed the deal with her, but the decks are clear. You should feel the Earth moving pretty soon.”
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